


Asset

by ninety6tears



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen, Mundane Mission, bereavement, off-screen character deaths
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 11:06:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,024
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14714859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninety6tears/pseuds/ninety6tears
Summary: “Believe me, I've had this debate,” she said, friendly but a little barbed. “Did they send me a fighter pilot with opinions on the baroque period?”(Written for a dice-roll prompt: "Kitsey Barbour goes into a bar and meets Poe Dameron.")





	Asset

She was a prism of different temperatures at first and second glance. Poe stirred the straw in his drink, now watered down after his wait, watching with spare interest the way the eagerness in her smile warmed the other talkative patrons of the field club. But there was something about her sparkle that was cold, reminding him vaguely of a vulptex, her affect sharpened at the slightest squint or tilt of her finely molded face.

Poe couldn't blame her for his being here on such a dull funds errand; it wasn't his usual operation and on the usual schedule of short notices everyone had to switch to other modes now and then, but even helping out in the kitchens at least offered company that Poe didn't find completely out of his world.

For the last hour he'd played the part of a newlywed whose partner had a habit of disappearing to watch the races, the name of whom he hadn't yet decided on because no one had asked. He and the contact had to appear newly and yet chastely acquainted in order to avoid any notice, which wouldn't be hard, but she was taking her sweet time.

Finally, just when he'd been daydreaming towards the huge swinging chronometer weights on the glass wall between the club and the visitors lobby, he heard a youthful voice ask, “Do you know how to read it?”

He looked up. She was holding this herbal-smelling cigarette in a shiny translucent holder, puffing primly. Her platinum and porcelain coloring was even icier up close, the tint of her cheeks standing out against alabaster. She wore some thin string of silver jewelry that attached at her ears and ran lightly down to the front of her cream-colored dress, floating just above her neck, catching more warning light than weight, like cobwebbing.

“The clock,” she clarified.

“I wasn't trying to.” He'd spent the glance at her on making sure they were alone. “I guess I'm expected.”

“I'm sure they told you my name, but you can call me Kitsey.”

“Poe Dameron.” He automatically reached out his hand.

“It's so nice to meet you,” she said, seeming to mean it as she gave him a brief clutch. “I think it's time for an early breakfast. Would you like to accompany me?”

The diner nook at the port side of the gigantic cruiser would have seemed more his speed if not for a glance at the prices. They both ordered caff, and Kitsey picked out some pastry that looked like it had taken the time that Poe would have spent cleaning his entire cockpit just to decorate with twisting edible ribbons of pink and white.

“I was told not to have it done until we'd communicated, at the last minute and when I could keep my eye on it,” she abruptly explained between bites. “It should take about five hours.”

“...I'm sorry—What will?”

“Oh, I didn't explain.” She patted a napkin over her fingernails and didn't make eye contact. She was good at looking for the next table over like the conversation was boring or uncomfortable or both. “I put out the offer about a painting because it becomes almost priceless if there's no reason to believe the art droid survived.”

He had to reconsider her. “That's quite a ruse to keep up. How big is the droid?”

“It took up most of my luggage space and it wasn't easy to get it through the hotels without declaring it. But the painting itself comes out small enough that it could have been in a little chest. People will believe I was able to grab it.”

“Well, someone already did buy it.” He couldn't help a mild scowl. “And then you'll just keep the droid to yourself forever, huh?”

“Believe me, I've had this debate,” she said, friendly but a little barbed. “Did they send me a fighter pilot with opinions on the baroque?”

“My mother was the one who knew art. I mean, a little. I just don't think the droids are fair. Art shouldn't be exclusively available to the elite. They should be equipping classrooms with those things—if you have the ability to reproduce a _Harbinger by Starlight_ , or _Boy with a Broken Staff_ for anyone’s eyes—”

“So you know a little bit,” she interrupted, brightening. “We had a Halle Osing reproduction at my school, actually.”

“Well. That was your school,” Poe remarked, only half trying to hide the smirk behind his caff cup.

“Without the droids,” she said, “only a few people can see it because there is only the original.”

“But the programming packages are only affordable to you.”

“We only had the one. We weren't collectors.”

“Hoarders, is what I'd call some of those.”

“You complain, but the value of this piece isn't just going to buy you a few more uniforms, if you know a good enough market source.”

“Well, let's make a deal. I win you the war and afterwards you can cop to the fraud and hand out reproductions to anyone who wants one.”

Her glowing smile was missing its full veneer. Her neck was held long and aloft, her eyes still never quite meeting his. They both knew she'd never do that.

“It was someone else who loved it more than I did,” she said after a moment.

He couldn't try to parse exactly what she meant. Finally he said, “It’ll take until the morning?”

“Yes,” she confirmed, alert again. “My room is 1654. Will you meet me there?”

 

 

 

She had an echoing business suite, not as festive a setting as the rest of the cruiser, and ridiculously large for a solo stay. By the time he arrived she was wearing a high-necked lounge tunic, the type of thing the more ostentatious guests were wearing on the gambling floor just to prove they might as well own the place. She said she could order him some clothes if he wanted to change, but he assured her he wouldn't be falling asleep anyway.

At this she paused in the motion of pouring a glass of wine at the bar. “You can't trust me to make sure no one else comes in?”

After she'd gotten the secret this far, it couldn't seem fair; he gave her a rueful look. “Procedure.”

“Sure, I know.”

She poured him something darker and brought it to him on her way to the wardrobe. From it she brought out something about the size and shape of a huge hat box, with a hard metal shell, and set it down close to Poe’s feet. She then set up the virginal block of white canvas so that it sat against the rim of the wide window that had a gauzy curtain drawn along it. Poe noticed the shapes of guests walking along the deck outside, but they'd have no idea what they were seeing if they caught any movement in the room.

He expected the hard box to contain some similar equipment—an easel of some kind?—and raised a startled look when her single press of a button popped out a series of automatic motions: a floral bloom of metal arms spun around a base which opened to a surprisingly large shape. With one additional adjustment from her hand, an optic probe began to run a measuring laser over the blank surface before giving some beep of confirmation, and she only had to let it be.

She picked up her delicate glass and took it with her to the long settee next to the desk chair he'd dragged out, and sat down with a prim crossing of legs as if ready to enjoy a private performance.

The droid was whirring out one shiny arm with a color-coded band, the brush at the end stilling and tilting in succession to get the weight of the self-refilling paint just right. He gave her a sidelong look. “How does it work to get all the strokes so exact?”

“The artist has to work with a special set of brushes with remotes in them. They're working entirely from a set of thousands of preset thicknesses and color palettes, so that it's exactly—”

She gave a nod just when, in a sudden yet seemingly calm movement, the arm’s brush pulled the first deliberate stroke of the background in a milky, slightly green color. He immediately understood what she was talking about; even though the motion was mechanical, the angle captured the exact nuance of a person’s wrist, a hand gripped by concentrated whims. The repeated movement fell down on the background in smooth consistent pressure, until it had to pause to refill the brush.

"Some of them take a very long time, even as long as weeks," Kitsey said. "You'll see in a few moments that this one makes and corrects the mistakes with a solvent brush...Some artists prefer to delete those phases out of the track, but Arborol...he considered mistakes to be a significant component of the final work.”

There was some studious recollection in the way Kitsey explained. Poe could easily visualize that someone, possibly of her family, had once sat with her like this and told her what she was telling him now, with an enthusiasm she could now echo but not quite possess.

There had been a momentarily different slope to her shoulders as she took out and operated the program minutes ago. He saw all of it, a kind of tired reverence towards the machine’s ghostly operation. He looked back to its progress, both of them saying nothing for the next hour.

Flowers took shape in formations of vague fireworks, positioned at three main points on the still life scene. After a while, Poe fell into a weird hypnosis fixed on the action, pausing for mental or physical breath at the intermittent paint fills and refills and focusing singly at every moment a brush was on the panel. The background slowly blushed into more richness, becoming the bent light and wood of a window in front of bright noon light. Darker shades bled into the contours of the flower petals, appearing increasingly dimensional, touchable. He lost hours watching, barely even registering the silence between himself and this near-stranger until he realized she'd fallen asleep.

There surely would have been plenty of talk on her home planet about her family being in the wrong place at the wrong time. First Order forces were constantly raiding the wealthier areas for resources, but they tended to have allies and sympathizers that made the process go without much of a hitch. Poe didn't know all the details, but this had been different: some small show of unexpected resistance earning a big fist of quick rebuttal, and among several civilians caught in the crossfire of the spaceport explosion had been one ship just trying to get off planet for Daddy’s first vacation time in a while.

The rumors and reports of the poor family of investors and socialites ended mostly on some variation of the image of one young survivor drifting away to the nearest pull of gravity. She was found within minutes of her oxygen running out, unconscious as a dreaming child buried under black rubble, clutching in her gloves something the news would assume was a survival case.

One of the dark chutes of a stem was forming under the petals and through the vase in a thin line of paint, then another. Poe tried to imagine that frantic last moment, giving up on saving anything other than a souvenir but somehow summoning the will to do even that. He wondered what kind of person, if anyone, it honored, and if she was only drifting through her foggy retroactive understanding of the impulse with all the poise of a weathered fighter.

She'd sank down into the couch a little, and the wine glass was loosely held in her tucked grasp. He reached and very carefully took it out of her hold to set it on the caff table.

He got up and came back with a blanket for her, but not before lingering to look at the painting a little bit longer.

 

 

 


End file.
